I remember 'Adventure' my brother in law got a copy from the States back in the eighties, I played it on my first computer (Amstrad!!) for hours it was the one that got me into adventure games, the next one I bought was Myst and thus I became hooked.

It was reading reviews of adventure games by a company called Artic (around 1981) that got me into computers and (obviously) adventure games in the first place. I didn't find out until last year that the company was set up by none other than Charles Cecil.

I've described playing adventure games as like watching a movie in which you control and interact with the characters. For some reason, I'm very seldom willing to sit through a movie but can spend hours at a time playing an adventure game. Maybe I'm just a control freak.

I went to a fantastic talk by John Ingold at AdventureX in December, in which he pointed out that Mass Effect 3 is a scifi adventure game with some tedious shooting bits, and LA Noire is a noiry adventure game with some tedious driving bits.

His point was that the question "Are adventure games dead?" has been resolutely answered by the very AAA industry which thought them dead in the first place: they have effectively done our research for us and come to the conclusion that their games are all a lot better with adventure-game aspects in them. XD

@Sparkle: I know the parallel between playing an adventure game/controlling a movie goes back a long long way, but I recently played The Last Express, which is extremely cinematic since it was shot in FMV (then rotoscoped). What's interesting from a cinematic perspective is that it uses things like a closeup, a character's expression or the way a character walks in a totally filmic way. I thought this was kind of different to your typical game made in, say, AGS, where the whole scene remains static but for a few sprites.